1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a display control device for displaying an image used in retrieval of a variety of content data, a content output system including the display control device, a method for controlling display of the image used in a retrieval operation, and a program for allowing the display control device to execute the display control of the image used in a retrieval operation.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, audio visual (AV) devices or information processing apparatuses which are for personal use and which are used at home, for example, have been networked and have achieved high performance, and furthermore, recording media having increased capacities have been used. That is, an environment for using advanced apparatuses has been provided. In addition, for example, users often possess a considerable amount of content data such as audio data and video data and enjoy the content data representing content using the AV devices.
A large amount of content data may be stored in a high-capacity recording medium such as an HDD (hard disc drive). The user may download content data such as music data or image data through a network such as the Internet and may store the content data in the HDD. Alternatively, the user may obtain content data from a CD (compact disc) or a DVD (digital versatile disc), for example, by ripping, and the obtained content data may be stored in the HDD. Then, arbitrary content data is selected from an amount of content data stored in the HDD to be reproduced.
An example of such a method is disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 9-214905.
Furthermore, a considerable amount of content data may be stored not only in an HDD, but also in a plurality of apparatuses (a plurality of recording media) in a distributed manner in a home network system configured by a plurality of information processing apparatuses, such as various AV apparatuses and personal computers.
In either way, the user selects a desired piece of content data to be reproduced, for example, from among the considerable number of pieces of content data. However, when the user wishes to retrieve the desired piece of content data, all pieces of stored content data need to be scanned and checked. The larger the amount of content data is, the longer the time necessary for retrieving the desired piece of content data takes. Accordingly, an effective scanning method has been demanded.
To this end, in general, various kinds of pieces of content data are tagged and managed so that a user may easily retrieve and view a desired piece of content data.
For example, for each of the pieces of content data, a date and time of recording, a content name such as a title of a piece of music or a title of a piece of work, a name of a performer, a name of a producer, a name of a film director, and a name of an actor are set as tag information and the tag information is used to search for a desired piece of content data.